Woodkid // Feature
"When I started playing my own music, I wanted it to be as tall as a skyscraper. Images can achieve that." - Outline's feature on NNF star, Woodkid.
Up until last year, Yoann Lemoine’s was a name most known for his striking art direction on music videos that you will have seen time and time again. They say you can’t buy style, but that’s entirely untrue in the case of artists like Katy Perry and Drake. While many of Katy Perry’s videos look like a Slush Puppie and sequin throw up, Lemoine afforded her a Hipstamatic Californian sunshine cool to her video, while Drake’s monochromatic video for his single with Rihanna was a far cry from the stock video fodder of ‘rap star in shot with expensive wheels and medallion’ that can be seen is his rap-by-numbers ‘Started from the Bottom’. These artists and more, including Lana del Rey famously and Taylor Swift have borrowed class by hiring Yoann as music video director, earning him two nominations at the UK Music Video Awards in the same year, and winning (beating himself) with his video for ‘Born to Die’, by del Rey. But that was very much the previous chapter in the Book of Lemoine, as invigorated ears are starting to appreciate: he was already a sight to behold, now he’s a sound to be heard as well. Read on as we attempt to characterise the multi-sensory experience that Woodkid brings to the world stage.
Have you ever heard that expression, ‘Jack of all trades, master of none’? Oh, you haven’t? Neither has Yoann Lemoine. It is a notion that defies his entire adult career, which has seen him mutate from a successful and noted illustrator, to screen printer, photographer, filmmaker, director, poet and songwriter. It’s hard to recall any artist, past or present, that has traversed and commanded so many different artforms entirely by themselves. Woodkid is the alter ego that manifests Yoann’s collective vision, yet at the heart of his music, is the most lo-fi collection of childhood anxieties.
Yoann was born in Lyon, France, but his family were from an Eastern European background, and Yoann spent parts of his childhood in Poland. It seems there were some striking memories borne out of that time in the East, yet we can only begin to decipher what they may be, as Yoann only alludes to character defining moments. “Deep in the ocean, dead and cast away, where innocence is burned, in flames. “A million miles from home I'm walking ahead;
I'm frozen to the bones, I am…”, he sings on previous single, ‘Iron’. There’s another allusion to a loss of innocence on ‘The Golden Age’, which lent the album its title. Here, The Golden Age refers to a time before awareness of adult preoccupations – death, war – there’s an urgency to flee this country that Yoann has described as a “desolate land”.
Flee the young boy did; he spent much of his childhood and adolescence in his home country, France, but in his pursuit of artistic mediums, he followed up his illustration and animation course with a stay in London, learning screen-printing techniques at Swindon College. It seems a far cry from the glamour of his adopted LA and New York nowadays. Both have been healthy for him, for work, as much of his time was being dominated by the requests from collaborators needing his directing services, but he managed to live and take in US life while he was there too. You can hear on ‘Brooklyn’, from his ‘Iron’ EP, that as inter-continental as life is for Yoann now, he leaves fragments of himself when he lands. Or people take fragments of him and keep them, like Harry Potter horcruxes, having a bit of his soul taken and kept.
Yoann has said that one of the universal themes of the album, related to the loss of innocence, and a foreboding realisation of death and war, is sexuality. He has been discreet about his own allegiances, but admits with the same subtlety of Frank Ocean’s confessions last year, that some of the songs are written for boys he has in mind. To take a look at his Tumblr, entitled Wood and Marble, there are many pictures of waiflike European looking boys and teens. If you were to try and connect the dots, crudely as it may seem, you could make an assumption that those images have a resonance with a period of self-discovery in Yoann’s own life.
It seems essential, as you learn more about Yoann, to purchase the book that was released alongside ‘The Golden Age’. Given the same title but written by Yoann’s own cousin, Katarzyna Jerzak, a published author and Princeton College professor in her own right, Yoann enlisted her to write his story, as she had shared much of it herself. Before giving an author talk on the novella at Potsdam Synagogue in New York, she explained, “It is dedicated to the mothers in our family, because in addition to being loosely based on Yoann's life, it has the history of our family which has been blessed with strong Jewish mothers.”
The deluxe edition of the album comes out this month, nestled in the back of the hardcover book, which has been given the same aesthetic attention of all of Yoann’s endeavours. A black canvas hardcover is highlighted by gilded keys, a gilt-edge frame, and tracklisting in an embossed style. It is also accompanied by fourteen original black and white illustrations – not by Yoann himself, but by artist Jillian Tamaki. It seems that unlike the majority of his exploitations, he needed guidance, and the joining of minds to get this significant debut to fruition.
The keys are a recurring motif. You might see them peppered around his online presence, on his website, his Tumblr, but they have a more permanent representation, as a tattoo on each of Yoann’s forearms. He has said that he got them done as a reaction to his parents; he was rebelling, he was 24, he was in New York. It’s a standard grown-up affair, but it belies the image of Yoann’s parents working in advertising, and his father being the first one to ignite a creative urge in his son. You would imagine that advertising parents were completely au fait with all forms of self-expression, but at some point, you stop being a product of your career, your surroundings; you are mum, you are dad, you are son.
So what of his music? Originally a mechanism for complete autonomy over the whole experience, having been restricted by using other people’s songs, this was an opportunity for him to merge all his collected disciplines and expel them with one motivation. He had to discover a singing voice; for the man who taught himself 3D animation, it seems primitive and small fry. The vocals mastered, he now performs with enough confidence that he doesn’t have to hide behind the visuals or effects, as much as they add to the experience. His Facebook page shows a recent video of a short set done for France Inter, sung acoustically, allowing the delicacy of the instrumentation to come to the fore. When it comes to the whole package though, the full shebang, Woodkid has hardly produced a sound that’s gone unnoticed. Advertising sync agencies have gone gaga over his music, employing it to sell their mobile network (O2), sports concepts (Nike+), cars (Peugeot 3008) and most extensively, their computer games (Assassin’s Creed). Such was the power of the relationship between the game and Woodkid’s music, that Ubisoft continued to use his sonic visuals across the whole release campaign.
This month, Woodkid brings his show to the Theatre Royal in Norwich as part of the Norfolk and Norwich Festival. The Theatre Royal is the perfect location for Woodkid to play in Norwich. A visual artist like him allows his notes to jump off the big screen with radical directness; and like he would compose a film he composes a live performance entering into a passionate affair with the stages of this world. So passionate that he, together with a 30-piece orchestra, turned the venerable Le Grand Rex theatre in Paris into a place of ecstasy in front of 3,000 listeners last September. “Music played a major part in my clips even before I started making my own music,” Woodkid points out. “When I started playing my own music, I wanted it to be as tall as a skyscraper. Images can achieve that. A really big orchestra can also achieve that, and that’s my answer to this question.” And it’s exactly the right answer; after all, what better way could there be to express that diversity of emotions, which a person is capable of than to allot them to the different instruments of an orchestra. This concept has a tradition. Just think of Sergei Prokofiev’s musical fairy-tale ‘Peter and the Wolf’, where each character in the story has a particular instrument. Woodkid operates in pretty much the same way. He takes emotions and allots them instruments. “That was the most plausible way for me to get a sonic cosmos to glow in Cinemascope format,” Woodkid continues. This way, his notes become as big as his images. “Take three chords which are played in sequence and you can illustrate an emotion,” he continues. “It feels to me as if the chord which has just been played simply provokes the subsequent one and so forth. I can’t help it. The sounds run through my head, instrumenting each number in a very precise way. I can hear each individual instrument. That way, the strings are the harmonic foundation of the numbers; they are not used as accompanying instruments, they act as the focus. Then I hear the wind section which lends an amazing power to the melodic arches and the timbales which propel the song on.” Finally he has created that sonic image in all its glory. He has delivered a true multimedia experience, on this album, his first of many, ‘The Golden Age’.
Emma R. Garwood
Woodkid comes to the Theatre Royal Norwich on Monday 13th May as part of the Norfolk and Norwich Festival billing. For tickets, go to www.theatreroyalnorwich.co.uk. For all the info on NNF 2013’s events, go to www.nnfestival.org.uk
